Oh piffle and better cuss word.

[Lemon law]

I built a new computer a year ago, and decided, on saving money basis, to reuse a Western digital Sata 1 80 GB HDD.
As I recall it is a basic 800 JD model.

Thank God I have an older puter that still half ways works for a back up, even though all updates are a year out of date.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my newer and way faster is puter is dead dead dead until I get a New HDD. The old drive flat out refuses to reformat.

My mobo will work with Sata2, don't know about Sata3, don't need anything much bigger than 80 GB, and I really really need some cost effective HDD drive recommendations for a windows XP pro reinstall, I have looked at new egg, the prices are not bad, a basic choice between WD, seagate, and fuji.

But since I prize reliability over speed, what will be cost effective and extremely reliable?

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

Honestly it's a toss-up. WD has a 5yr warranty on their drives, Seagate has a 3yr, and I don't know about Fuji. I picked up a 750GB Samsung F1 last year for my OS drive and recently bought a 1TB WD Caviar Black for backup purposes.

Right now I'm running diagnostics to try and get the WD detected by the OS, but in any case the choice comes down to what brand you prefer. Caviar Black drives have dual drive controllers and are a couple MB/s faster, but have a small price premium. They also have a 5yr warranty which may or may not matter to you. Just pick a 1TB which you fancy and check it out.

There is a thread on how to break-in a HDD, the consensus as I read was that you break in a HDD to weed out early failures before use, with various methods listed to accomplish this including one I proposed.